Danish has a distinctive vowel length opposition which is realized with little differences in vowel qualities. This paper investigates the possibilities of using this fact in reducing the size of the speech unit database in a high quality concatenative based text-to-speech system for Danish. The purpose is to evaluate the concept of using long vowels for synthesizing the corresponding short vow...

This paper reports two experiments with vowels and consonants as phoneme detection targets in real words. In the first experiment, two relatively distinct vowels were compared with two confusible stop consonants. Response times to the vowels were longer than to the consonants. Response times correlated negatively with target phoneme length. In the second, two relatively distinct vowels were com...

This article discusses the results of a study which investigated Cantonese ESL learners’ perception of English vowels and their perceived similarity between similar L1 and L2 vowels in an attempt to test the prediction of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM). Forty university English majors participated in three L2 perception tasks, which aimed at discerning their perception of English vowel...

Adults and infants were tested for the capacity to detect correspondences between nonspeech sounds and real vowels. The /i/ and /a/ vowels were presented in 3 different ways: auditory speech, silent visual faces articulating the vowels, or mentally imagined vowels. The nonspeech sounds were either pure tones or 3-tone complexes that isolated a single feature of the vowel without allowing the vo...

Identification of simultaneous speech sounds, such as pairs of steady-state vowels (double vowels), is more accurate when there is a difference in fundamental frequency (F0). Accuracy of identification for double vowels increases with increasing F0 difference (delta F0) asymptoting above 1 semitone. The experiment described here attempts to distinguish two mechanisms underlying this effect: fir...

The importance of secondary-stressed (SS) and unstressed-unreduced (UU) syllable accuracy for spoken word recognition in English is as yet unclear. An acoustic study first investigated Russian learners' of English production of SS and UU syllables. Significant vowel quality and duration reductions in Russian-spoken SS and UU vowels were found, likely due to a transfer of native phonological fea...

This experiment determined the relation between discrimination thresholds and thejudgement of vowels as good, confusable, or non-English. A large Fl-by-F2 vowel space encompassing five American English front vowels was synthesized in equal Bark steps. The structure of the vowel space was quite different across listeners except for the vowels /i/ and Gael. Discrimination thresholds were uniform ...

Several studies have shown enhancement of auditory evoked sustained responses for periodic over non-periodic sounds and for vowels over non-vowels. Here, we directly compared pitch and vowels using synthesized speech with a "damped" amplitude modulation. These stimuli were parametrically varied to yield four classes of matched stimuli: (1) periodic vowels (2) non-periodic vowels, (3) periodic n...

This study shows that a corpus of proto-word forms shares four sequential sound patterns with words of modern languages and the first words of infants. Three of the patterns involve intrasyllabic consonant-vowel (CV) co-occurrence: labial (lip) consonants with central vowels, coronal (tongue front) consonants with front vowels, and dorsal (tongue back) consonants with back vowels. The fourth pa...

Speakers can adopt a speaking style that allows them to be understood more easily in difficult communication situations, but few studies have examined the acoustic properties of clearly produced consonants in detail. This study attempts to characterize the adaptations in the clear production of American English fricatives in a carefully controlled range of communication situations. Ten female a...